Good morning. Saudi Arabia and the Houthis continued to trade strikes. Ukraine rejected President Trump’s suggestion that it get a new president. And Trump floated renaming an ocean “Trump Ocean.” We’ll get to more news. But first, let’s look at some of the candidates running to be governors.
Executive action
Much of the energy this election season — the most aggressive ad buys, the biggest-name surrogates — has been with the congressional midterms. There’s good logic to that: The House and the Senate are up for grabs, so a well-placed ad or a viral moment could make all the difference. But 36 states will also vote on their next governors, and those races, too, matter — a lot. States experiment with ideas that may eventually inspire federal laws; they are the nation’s policy laboratories. And governors approve congressional maps, influence election procedures and fill Senate vacancies. That makes them key players in the coming presidential contest, too. Here are a few governors’ races that are worth watching. Georgia
The Peach State is a presidential battleground — President Trump lost it by 0.2 percentage points in the 2020 cycle (when it also elected two Democratic senators), then won it by two in 2024. Yet it has not elected a Democratic governor since 1998. The incumbent is term-limited, and this year’s open contest is a nail-biter. The Republican nominee, the billionaire health care executive Rick Jackson, didn’t receive Trump’s endorsement in the primary but triumphed anyway after cramming the airwaves with more than $80 million in self-funded ads. Now Jackson has a huge financial advantage over his Democratic opponent, the former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and a slight lead in the polls. That’s notable because of the eight- to 10-point lead that Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, appears to have in the Senate race. His party has thrown lots of its resources in the state behind him, to help secure control of the upper chamber. Both governor candidates promise to bring down living costs, specifically by cutting taxes. And the outcome could have implications for 2028: Ossoff and the state’s other senator, his fellow Democrat Raphael Warnock, may run for president. If either won, a Republican governor could appoint a Republican to fill his seat. Ohio
The contest between Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican billionaire entrepreneur, and Amy Acton, a Democratic former public health official, has become one of the cycle’s ugliest, my colleague Campbell Robertson reports. The candidates portray each other in ads as a con artist and a drunk, even as voters want help with issues closer to their lives, like the cost of living and health care. Ramaswamy has bankrolled much of his own campaign, even as his backers outspend hers on advertising by more than three to one. But he has lost ground among likely voters, and Acton recently took a small lead, according to a Times/Siena poll. Ohio hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in two decades, and Trump won the state in 2024 by the widest presidential margin since Ronald Reagan. Trump recently asked Ohioans at a rally to pretend he was on the ballot and vote accordingly — “even if you hate Vivek Ramaswamy.” But voters have soured on the president, and 11 percent of his 2024 supporters intend to vote for Acton, our pollster found. Texas
Democrats have not won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. But this year, they feel bullish. They’re cautiously optimistic that their nominee for Senate, James Talarico, could prevail. And Gov. Greg Abbott now narrowly trails his Democratic challenger, the Austin-based lawyer Gina Hinojosa, according to our poll. Hinojosa, like many candidates for governor, has struggled to raise big money. (Talarico, by contrast, has taken in more than $70 million.) But Democrats are now investing in her race, my colleague Reid Epstein reports, and Abbott’s once-vast financial advantage appears to have abated. Hinojosa is viewed more positively than negatively, though about a third of voters don’t have an opinion of her. That might work to her benefit in a year when her opponent will share the ballot with unpopular brands like Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Republican nominee for Senate. Abbott has also had to defend his record on polarizing topics like Flock cameras, data centers … and the 47th president. When Trump stopped in San Antonio last week to campaign with Republicans in the state, Abbott didn’t come. He said he had a scheduling conflict. Build your own Senate map
Do you think Democrats have a shot in Iowa? Will Republicans hold their seat in Maine? Our new interactive tool lets you decide how the Senate battleground races will turn out. Follow the dataOur experts were suspicious about efforts to overly analyze early votes. (They explain why those returns can be misleading.) So they built their own way to track early vote data, focusing on what is actually known from the returns in key Senate battleground states, and leaving the speculation behind. Follow it here.
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